With all the electronic appliances you need in your home office, the number of electrical cords and plugs can be huge. So even if you’ve worked hard to make your office look tidy and organized, all those tangled cords can ruin the effect. They can also be a safety hazard, as it’s all too easy to trip over them and fall. What you need is a cord control system.
Fortunately, several useful solutions to this problem are available at your office supplies store. Here’s a rundown on what you have to choose from.
The first thing you’ll want is a six-plug wall adapter, which allows you to plug in six items in one wall outlet.
Another essential is a power bar, or power strip, a bar of outlets at the end of a cord, which is then plugged into the wall outlet. It’s a good idea to spend a little extra on this and get one that is also a surge protector, especially if one of the plugs is for your computer wires. This keeps your computer from going down (with frustrating loss of information) when there’s an electrical storm going on around you.
One problem with both these items, however, is that many of the plugs that come with your appliances are big, square, clunky things that take up so much space that they cover the outlet beside the one they are using. A great solution to this problem is a relatively new item that has one main cable, but instead of a bar at the end it has six separate, short, flexible cords, each with one outlet. This lets you plug in the big square adaptors without blocking other outlets. Brilliant!
Depending on where your furniture is placed, you might find you have a very long cord that really only needs to reach across a couple of feet to its outlet. So what do you do with all the excess cord? Look for a little gadget called a cord organizer disc. It’s like two rubber discs joined together; you wrap the cord around the middle and then snap the outside pieces over. It looks like a yoyo, and it’s a lot better than a long cord that’s just waiting for you to trip over it.
Finally, try running all your cords through a cord zipper, a wide tube with an opening down the long side that lets you slip the cords inside. Instead of a whole bunch of cords running down your wall or along your floor, you have one single tube — much neater. And by the way, use colored electrical tape to color code your cords so that you’ll always know which cord goes with which appliance.
Cord control is necessary not only for appearance, but also for your safety.